Saturday, March 17, 2007

300 - The Movie

300 - The Movie is made for stupid people.

PS: what makes it stupid is the speechifying.


For instance, as per Wikipedia,

"The Spartans sent 45,000 men under the command of Pausanias, 5,000 Spartiates (full citizen soldiers), 5,000 perioeci and 35,000 helots; this was the largest single Spartan fighting force ever to appear in battle. Spartan forces typically included relatively few actual Spartan soldiers, and mostly consisted of perioeci, helots (serfs, servants of the state) and soldiers provided by their allies."

Helots?

And elsewhere:

"Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan Ephors (Classical Greek Ἔφοροι) would pro forma declare war on the Helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a Helot without fear of blood guilt. Unarmed, the Krypteia were sent out into the countryside with the instructions to kill any Helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed. This could be used to remove any Helots considered troublesome and provide the young men with a manhood test and experience of their first kill. Such brutal oppression of the Helots permitted the Spartans to control the agrarian population and devote themselves to military practice."

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Obviously Victor Davis Hanson the "historian" never read this, and is not about to! He gives historians and history a bad name. And not surprisingly the movie has been panned by people who know something about Greece and its past - the historians in Greece i.e.,!